I love autumn. I love the world going quiet, and people staying indoors more. I love the sensation that, slowly but surely, I'm becoming the only person outside. I love the sound a leaf makes when it falls off a tree - a muffled pop followed by a soft swishing. Even when it dive bombs down. I love the smell of the bonfires. This Halloween I'll be seeing the World/Inferno Friendship Society's Hallowmas show - probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me. One of my favorite bands playing on what used to be my favorite holiday, and seeing them with some of my favorite people.
Having come to terms with the fact that the road trip keeps getting pushed back into the reaches of "You're Chicken Shit and It's Never Going To Happen", I decided I would take a vacation for my birthday. My big birthday plans were pretty simple. I was going to get a hotel room at some beach in New Jersey, and just take a few days to sit and watch the wave roll in and feel like I was the only one in the world. I wanted to watch the stars rise over the Atlantic. Little light pollution. Nothing to keep the wind at bay. Everything feeding my hopes of an alien abduction (hey, we all have dreams).
No real noise. No real problems for a day or two. Just me, my laptop, and the whole world over.
I've always wanted to live near a large body of water. Something I can see - not "it's only a mile away" - you know, step out the back door and, boom, large body or water. Fuck, even a lake or something, Great or otherwise. Granted, I'd prefer not to be able to see the other side on a clear day, but I'm willing to compromise. Or resign myself to it. Really it's just a matter of degrees.
But that's my idea of Heaven. A cosmic beach in mid-autumn, bare feet, jeans and a hoodie, feeling equally small and infinite. The metaphor of endings and beginnings being one and the same, the ouroboros still circling. And no fucking loud mouthed "Lookatme!" assholes around. It's too cold for them. At fifty degrees, it might as well be night's Plutonian shores at high noon.
But I'll go for the once-in-a-lifetime show, and be with people I adore. I can always cast my eye back there later. True, it will be November, but that doesn't bother me. I'd prefer October, true, but that's because all of the things I like about October are things I liked about my childhood. People get quieter, the world is going to sleep, and I feel like I'm waking up. All of the people I knew were old and in various stages of dying, and yet they never felt that far away, because around my birthday (on my father's birthday inpointoffact) some folks believed they came back and walked around once more.
In Buddhism, the west is the land of the dead. But every western ocean arrives on an eastern shore.
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